About the so-called digital anthropology.
Answer to a question (Which theorists should I know on digital / virtual ethnography and / or netnography for to research about digital culture?) of a Polish researcher on Research Gate,
Digital Anthropology for someone like me, who is 74 years old, and belongs to the "old guard", is a NON-ANTHROPOLOGY. The main technique of the ethno-anthropologist is participant observation, which is fully realized when you really go down on the field. Long, long ago, scholars relied almost entirely on sources, not just first-hand (such as missionaries or government officials), but even second-hand. Writing theories and monographs while sitting comfortably at home and in an armchair (Armchair Anthropologists). Then we saw that it was necessary, as they say, to "get your hands (and shoes) dirty". Going to the ground. Where difficulties of all kinds are often encountered. But it is there that we are together with the object-subject of our investigations: the inhabitants of the village, of the neighborhood of a city, and so on. It is there that a relationship is established with the other, which is made up of interrelationships and inter-locutions of various kinds, verbal, but also non-verbal. Without forgetting the administration of questionnaires, with open or closed answers, or the development of topics by school students.
Sometimes it will be necessary to use an interpreter, but it will be always the face-to-face relationship to be privileged. As I have constantly tried to do during of my researches carried out in Africa (Northern Kenya and South Sudan), Mexico, Inuit of the Canadian Arctic, maritime communities of the North Atlantic (Arctic Svalbard, included).
Therefore digital anthropology cannot become a specialization of a discipline which, by its very nature, is interested in man in flesh and blood, and not in virtual realities. While it is the technological aspect, i.e. immediate access to the world, in its most diversified ramifications (libraries, archives, universities, images, ministries, international agencies, etc .; video conferences and webinars: Skype, Zoom or Remo, with colleagues scattered around the four corners of the earth, etc.), has meant that today it is no longer necessary to organize expensive and prolonged study missions, to collect background or collateral data from around the world: historical, demographic and of other nature, which we can simply and quickly get from home.
p.s. The caption of the photo goes on: on the right, the assistant Albino, always proud of his showy hat, and the A. take notes; the old man weaves a vegetable rope. Two warriors assist: one smokes a pipe, the other has two spears.